24: In Spartan Time
by Kavek
Summary: Halo and '24' crossover. Jack004 is a Spartan who is disabled during his biological upgrading, thus expelling him from the SPARTAN II project. But then, he is contacted by ONI Section Zero with an offer, and all hell breaks loose. On hold.


**A/N: This is an odd concept. Very experimental. But I promise you, this story isn't going to rely on the 'star power' of Halo and '24'. It will certainly utilize those, but it will not depend on them. Oh, and please pardon any inconsistencies in the timeline as it relates to the Halo storyline. And, if you know better, tell me, so I can fix it. ;-)**

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_The haze of morphine dulled his brain, but he jerked uncontrollably. His impulses were completely uncontrolled, violent, making his hideously strong body lurch across the gurney, slamming himself against the rails. Two male nurses were doing their best to hold him down, but his small body was too strong._

_Doctor Gorman muttered in frustration as he struggled to hold the patient's arm down, trying to keep the ever-important IV in place. "Dammit, give him 6 cc's of dioxymenoprizol. Get him quiet. He'll kill himself at this rate."_

_The only female nurse in the OR complied, whisking up a syringe and stabbing it into a secondary vent on the plastic tubing. "Done."_

_After a few seconds, the patient finally calmed, and his body stopped moving, tangled in the paper sheets. The male nurses stepped back, one glancing at the now twisted and dented rails. He whistled, long and low. "Who the hell is this, anyway?" he asked, quiet with awe and a kind of reverence. "He's just a kid - what, sixteen?"_

_Gorman looked up. "You'll know soon enough."_

* * *

The room was black. 

For some reason, that was all that could get through Jack-004's head.

The room was black.

This bothered him.

He tried to move, and suddenly, he was sitting upright in bed, like some kind of tightly-strung Frankenstein. The room was still black.

A familiar voice spoke, coming from the inky ebony in front of him. "Jack."

He blinked, once, twice. Tilted his head up in the close darkness and squinted, trying to make sense of what was presented. "Yes, Dr. Halsey?" Something felt different about him. His arms were light. He lifted them, felt them. They seemed larger.

Dr. Catherine Halsey folded her arms and sighed. Jack was number three, and once again, she had to tell the awful news. "I'm afraid I have bad news, Jack."

The young man nodded, trying to focus, but the aftereffects of the powerful sedatives still dampened his mental faculties. And his vision was refusing to clear.

He tried to make everything concrete, keep it simple: _OK, bad news, Jack. She has bad news. Listen up. _"Yes, ma'am?"

"While you were in surgery, Jack… something went wrong during the occipital capillary reversal. Your eyes… rejected the procedure, and your retinas ruptured so badly that they had to be removed."

_That _made it through. It shocked his mind, and he leaned back into the mattress, slowly. _Focus, Jack. Focus. _"Oh." It was all he could get out. "I see." The bitter irony of that phrase suddenly came to him, and he grimaced. He tried to maintain discipline and professionalism as he realized what this meant.

Then, Dr. Halsey solidified it for him. "This means that… you're no longer a part of the SPARTAN-II program, Jack." She stopped, looked down at her feet. "I'm sorry."

Then, before the erstwhile Spartan could say another word, she turned and briskly stepped out, eyes brimming with guilty tears.

Jack was a Spartan. He was immeasurably proud of this. His brothers and sisters-at-arms were his family; he had never known another. And now… it was gone, along with his eyesight.

Frustration and bitterness filled him; he gripped the rails of his bed. And he squeezed. The metal buckled beneath his fists as he struggled not to cry, his body shaking, wracked with grief. His life, his meaning for existence, was gone.

* * *

The ceremony was short and bitter for Jack. He and twelve other Spartans who had suffered fates much like his own, sat and watched - or listened - as his brothers and sisters were commissioned for combat. 

Then, they were all wheeled or led away, doomed to meaningless putrefaction in what amounted to either desk-work or life in a nursing facility. Jack wasn't sure where he'd end up, but he didn't care. He would rather die than continue in this wretched existence.

* * *

He was sitting, mind blank, in the recovery room, when his newly-sensitive ears picked up a soft, familiar footfall. For some reason, he instinctively knew who it was, and he roused himself from his self-pity just in time to hear Dr. Halsey's voice again. 

"Jack. I have some good news," she said.

She sounded so fake. Jack nodded, but remained stoically silent.

"Your doctor, Henry Gorman, tells me that he is capable of performing surgery upon your eyes, replacing them with cybernetic implants."

Jack suddenly perked up. If he could see, maybe he could…

"You would not be able to… rejoin the Spartans, but you would be able to lead a normal life."

He wilted inwardly. A normal life. What in heaven's name did he know about a 'normal life'? He mused over the details of the surgery that had been passed on to him: all processes successful, with the exception of the retinal enhancement and the thyroid implant. How pointless they all were, now.

He forced himself to speak. "Okay." He could not coax any more words from his mouth. Dr. Halsey understood. She reached out a tentative hand… laid it on his shoulder for a moment. Understanding. That helped Jack more than anything. But then, the cool, smooth skin left his shoulder, and he was alone again. Alone in darkness.

* * *

The surgery was successful, and Jack received his implants. They were like much like organic eyes in many aspects, better in some ways, poorer in others. 

This, he pondered, as he examined them in the mirror. They looked like human eyes, as nearly as possible, save for the otherworldly hardness. As a 'humanizing' factor, the eyes had false irises, a deep shimmering blue composed of real human tissue. The pupils, actually metal diaphragms peering through a gap in the synthflesh and ceramic orbs, were black holes into dark circuitry and transistors, machinery. They mirrored the mind that lay behind them, suddenly without purpose in the world, now left to stagnate and grind upon itself.

The image presented to him in the mirror was odd - his eyes made a false infinity loop in the mirror itself, sending images of the blonde, sandy-haired, grim faces deep into oblivion. The eyes themselves presented a normal view of the world to Jack. There was, perhaps, a small amount of 'bulge' at the edges of his vision, but this heightened his peripheral. Color was brighter, clearer. Images were sharper. The mechanisms were neurally linked to his lace, so that he could call up a primitive HUD that gave him the date, time, and a small map.

He nodded. It was efficient, yet it was fragile. EMP could eliminate his sight. In the presence of extremely powerful magnetic force, the optics would become sensitive. A blow to his head could potentially disable them. Breakable. Like his treacherous body.

He sighed, rubbed his tired face with his left hand. He ticked off the plans in his mind. ONI had given him a few very specific orders during his debriefing and discharge, the greatest of which was to keep his past a secret. No one must know that he had been part of the SPARTAN-II program. So they gave him a new name, a new past, a new home.

He pulled the papers from his messenger bag and looked them over again.

_Name: Jack Bauer  
__DOB: Unknown  
__Born: California, United North American Hegemony  
__Personal:  
__- Father - Phillip  
__- Brother - Graem  
__Currently living: New Mombassa, East African Protectorate  
_

_Jack Bauer. _He pondered that. His new name. His new identity. His new life.

He bent down and picked up his messenger bag. Within were his only possessions: a few changes of clothing, his precious M9 sidearm, and enough food and money for a week. Hanging it from his now thickening frame, he turned and left the ONI hospital, never to return.

At seventeen years old, he was alone in the world.

* * *

_Six years later..._

He opened his eyes. The servomotors activated, and images streamed to his brain. The moon was pouring into his bedroom window, and he felt a strange chill in his altered bones. He spared a glance for the slumbering figure beside him, and a quiet rush warmed him. He carefully rose from the bed, his movements so controlled that the mattress hardly shifted. His feet felt the cold hardwood of the bedroom floor, and a second chill rushed up his legs as he moved to the window and looked out.

Jack felt strangely conflicted.

Somewhere, beyond those stars, his fellow Spartans were being hurled into battle with the rebels. Much had been made of them here on Earth and elsewhere in the Colonized Worlds. ONI Section Two had done a good job with the propaganda effort. Nothing but praise for the program dripped from the news media, glorifying the foresight of the Office of Naval Intelligence, the vast wisdom of the United Nations Space Corps. Yet when battle reports came back and were printed in the paper, Jack would read these and instinctively know that something was horribly wrong.

Each time, casualty reports would be... strange, somehow. No KIAs. But plenty of WIAs and MIAs. The circumstances that surrounded these events were... suspicious at best. And Jack knew. Despite the facade that ONI Two was building, his brothers and sisters were dying in space. That hurt him, pressed horribly and filled him with guilt.

For here, in New Mombassa, he was happy.

His gaze roved to the feminine figure lying tangled in the sheets. His wife. Terri. And their daughter, little Kimberly. He had a job with the East African Protectore Internal Investigations Division, a desk job, using his intellect to analyze the rebels - their terrorist activities, their methods, tactics. He enjoyed it. But as much as he loved it, he knew what he _wanted _to be doing.

And he knew what he would be missing if he _was _doing what he wanted to do.

_Shut up, Bauer. You're torturing yourself for no reason. Go to sleep._

So he went back and slid beneath the blankets. He tenderly enfolded his sleeping wife in his arms, and he slept.

* * *

The next morning, he arrived early at the IID. Briefcase in hand, he slid behind his desk and initialized his system, ready to pick up where he had left off the day before. Just then, his dumb AI, Croesus, appeared on the holopad. "Good morning, Mr. Bauer," he smoothly intoned, one hand lightly ruffling his golden robe. Jack nodded, already distracted by work. "Morning. Uh... could you call up the data on the Eridanus case?" 

Croesus glanced at him with languid surprise. "Of course, sir, but do you not wish to see the message?"

Jack looked up. "Message?"

The AI nodded amicably and gestured. A small blip on Jack's screen grew substantially. "It was encoded, with strict orders to make it your-eyes-only."

Jack frowned. _Who would send me a YEO over civ bandwidth? _He opened the message, glanced at the header. "Christopher Henderson... Croesus, run a check on that name from IID databases."

The AI nodded. "I shall do so immediately, sir," and, in a spray of golden computer code, he vanished.

Jack scanned the letter. It opened with the usual salutations, then suddenly grabbed his attention by the throat and slammed it against a wall.

"_Dear Mr. Bauer -_

_"My name is Christopher Henderson, ONI- Section Zero." _

"Section _Zero?_" he whispered aloud. Section Zero wasn't even supposed to exist. The Starways Congress denied that there was, ever had been, or ever would be a Section Zero.There were, of course, some conspiracy theorists who proclaimed that Zero was actually the section of ONI that controlled the government, but thus far, there was no proof that such a thing existed...

"_Perhaps you have heard of us. Rumor seems to follow our activities, and I daresay some of the crazies who rant about us may be more accurate than they think. But this is unimportant - permit me to come to the crux of this missive. _

_"Section Zero of ONI serves three purposes: internal investigations, much like the work you currently do for the IID, counter-terrorist activity, and black-ops jobs. We make it our job to know everything - including your past, Mr. Bauer. We know that you were once a part of Section Two's SPARTAN-II project. You were then known as Jack-004. When in surgery to undergo the biological enhancements, your eyes had to be removed and replaced with implants. _

_"You were bitter about this, if reports are to be believed. Understandably so. After all, you had lived with the Spartans your whole life, and now your substantial talent is going to waste behind a desk._

_"Section Zero has an offer for you. Our Counter-Terrorism Unit in New Mombassa is in need of a new chief field agent. It must be someone who thinks quickly on his feet, who can handle weapons, who can have the capacity to suffer beyond all human limits. It requires substantial knowledge of guerilla tactics, an understanding of the psyche of the Rebels. We believe that the answer to our need is you, Mr. Bauer. _

_"Once you have completed reading this message, it will be purged from your system, and from ours. If you desire to contact me for this position, then say the following key to your AI: 'The Laecdamonean has returned.' This will trigger a cycle that I have encoded into his software. You will recieve contact information bearing my name, and Croesus will be deleted, so as to prevent any record of Section Zero contacting you. _

_"Humanity needs you, now, Jack. Not as the regular man you've become, but as the Spartan that you are._

_"Sincerely,  
Christopher Henderson, CTU, Cmndg."_

Jack sighed and rested his chin in his hand. _Well. _He contemplated it for a moment, and looked around at his gray office. He considered the mess of papers on his desk, the grimy window behind him, the wilting ceiling fan that rattled every time he turned it on. Was he happy with this job?

Just then, Croesus reappeared. "Sir, I'm afraid that the name 'Christopher Henderson' does not appear in IID databases." The AI looked slightly annoyed at the idea, but then, data mining was his primary function.

Jack glanced up at the AI, then said, "Thank you, Croesus. Thanks for everything."

Then, before the AI could respond: "The Laecdamonean has returned."

* * *

**Now. Here's where the experimental part of this story comes in. Read this, then PM me with how you'd like the story to go. The idea that I like the most gets written up. Periodically, as we go along, there may be more of these public opinion polls, so keep reading. ;-)**


End file.
